Born Alexandra Durlacher in Malta in 1937, Alexandra Asseily is a psychotherapist and spiritual thinker whose experience of conflict has inspired a lifelong commitment to peace and forgiveness.
Alexandra’s father (Admiral Sir Laurence Durlacher) was of British and Jewish descent, while her mother (Rimma Sass- Tisovsky) came from a Russian-Ukrainian Orthodox family who emigrated from Kharkiv, Ukraine to Mougins, France in 1920 during the Russian Civil War. She grew up in Malta, Singapore, and the UK, where she lived through the Blitz in the Second World War.
In 1969, Alexandra married George Asseily, a Lebanese Greek-Orthodox businessman, and moved to Beirut. As a witness to the pain of Lebanon’s civil war (1975–1990), she began to explore her
Paul Doutrich is a professor emeritus of American history at York College of Pennsylvania where he taught for thirty years. He now lives on Cape Cod in Brewster, Massachusetts.
